Fresh from being cleared by the Supreme Court of graft charges in the multi-billion peso coconut levy case, Presidential Chief Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile said he will now seek accountability for the lost state trust fund for coconut farmers.
The Presidential Commission on Good Government should reveal to the people what happened to the sequestered coconut levy fund, Enrile demanded.
“I am asking the PCGG to tell the public if the coconut levy fund money of about P78 billion is still intact,” the veteran public servant said in his weekly Bayan ni Juan program yesterday.
“The agency should also disclose what happened to the United Coconut Planters Bank which was created out of coco levy money, 72.5 percent of its capital coming from coconut farmers’ contributions,” Enrile said.
“UCPB was mismanaged into bankruptcy,” Enrile stressed.
In March last year, UCPB was merged with the state-owned Land Bank of the Philippines. The merger in effect made UCPB, the country’s first universal bank, defunct since the surviving entity was LandBank.
The Supreme Court dismissed on 9 February the graft charges filed against Enrile and several others in connection with the coconut levy fund, citing the government’s failure to justify the delays in pursuing the case.
In its decision, the Court’s First Division dismissed the complaint against Enrile et al. due to the “violation of their constitutional right to a speedy disposition of cases.”
When martial law was declared in 1972, the first crisis that the government faced was the depleted supply of coconut oil amid the high cost of the product in the global market, which forced producers to prioritize exports.
This resulted in all copra production going to the export market, which in turn caused a shortage in coconut oil which local manufacturers used as an ingredient in animal feeds, soap manufacturing, and in margarine and butter production.
“Then President Ferdinand E. Marcos told his officials: if you can’t lower the cost of coconut oil for local use, I will ban the export of copra,” Enrile narrated.
Enrile then called coconut industry stakeholders to a meeting at the Camelot Hotel in Quezon City, where the agreed solution was the creation of a fund to which coconut planters would voluntarily contribute based on a percentage of their copra sales at the farmgate price.
The fund was to be used to subsidize the price at which farmers would sell their copra to the local market so that consumers could be spared from high prices.
Successful coco levy scheme
That started the coconut levy program, the collections for which reached P9.7 billion.
From that total, P7.2 billion was used for a price subsidy, while the remainder of P2.5 billion was deposited in the Philippine National Bank.
President Marcos then appointed Enrile as the concurrent administrator of the Philippine Coconut Authority.
Coconut producers then sought P92 million from the coco levy fund. To which Enrile said: “So I asked them what are you going to do with the money. They told me that P60 million would be used to procure fertilizers that would be distributed to coconut planters and P32 million was for purchasing agricultural machinery.”
“So I asked how they could assure that the funds would be used for their intended purpose but they couldn’t give me a straight answer,” Enrile said.
He said he did not grant their request but instead told them that those who needed fertilizer and machinery should take out a loan and pay interest.
“After that, the subsidy scheme for coconut prices ended and P2.5 billion was left. We used part of the money to pay for the setting up of oil mills and the rest for the purchase of San Miguel Corp. shares.
“After that, the Presidential Commission on Good Government created during the term of the late President Corazon Aquino sequestered the coco levy funds,” he said.
“So what happened? All of those seized assets were sold by the government for P76 billion and the oil mills assets had a total value of P130 billion,” Enrile said.
“So imagine P9.5 billion that went into the levy, the amount not used for subsidies grew to hundreds of billions of pesos which became the basis of the ill-gotten wealth cases against us.”
There was no trial for 37 years because they couldn’t present any evidence. It was good that I’m out on bail, if not I would have been detained for that span of time,” he added.
This was the case that was dismissed by the Supreme Court. “In all honesty, the government did not have a case because it couldn’t produce any evidence whatsoever,” Enrile contended.
“At best, it was meant to harass me,” he noted.
Most respondents passed away
The court also ordered the dismissal of the same case against Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., Jose Eleazar, Maria Clara Lobregat, and Augusto Orosa given their supervening deaths.
“Taken in its entirety, there is a clear violation of the respondents’ constitutional right to a speedy disposition of cases when petitioner Republic failed to provide sufficient justification in the termination of the preliminary investigation. Consequently, a dismissal of the case is warranted,” the SC said.
The SC added that the government failed to establish that the delay was reasonable and justified.
“In particular, petitioner Republic did not prove that it followed the prescribed procedure in the conduct of the preliminary investigation and the prosecution of the case, the complexity of the issues and the volume of evidence made the delay inevitable and (that) no prejudice was suffered by the accused as a result of the delay,” it said.
The Office of the Solicitor General representing the government had taken the case to the SC after then Ombudsman Aniano Desierto in 1998, following the review and recommendation of graft investigator Emora Pagunuran, had dismissed the graft complaint filed against Enrile and the other respondents.
The Ombudsman said the complaint should be dismissed on the ground of prescription of the offense prompting the government to question Desierto’s ruling before the High Court.
The case arose from a complaint filed by the OSG before the PCGG, which was subsequently referred to the Ombudsman.
It involved the decision on 19 April 1983 of the UCPB board where Cojuangco was president and Enrile was chairman in connection with the resolution of a board of administrators decision awarding liquidated damages of P958 million from the Coconut Industry Development Fund or CIDF to a private corporation named Agricultural Investors Inc. or AII.